Today on TRI with CoachParry, our resident triathlete coach Rudolf Naude dives into swimming drills and how important they are for beginner triathletes. Rudolf gives some examples of some easy drills to start with and often these should be incorporated into your swimming training program.

If you're looking for some triathlon specific training programs - from beginner sprint programs all the way to advanced IronMan programs and a very active members forum, podcasts and training videos; go to coachparry.com/triathlon

Swimming drills for triathletes

BRAD
Welcome on to our next video here on coachparry.com. I'm Brad Brown, and it's an absolute pleasure to welcome our triathlon coach on to the video, Rudolf Naude. Rudolf, welcome, nice to have you.

RUDOLF
How's it, Brad, thank you for having me.

BRAD
Rudolf, today's question is one that I ask, I mean, I've been around the sport for a while now as well and I'm terrible. I shouldn't actually admit this. But swimming drills be the death of me. The reason I say that is because I don't have a clue what I'm doing. So for someone starting out in the sport of triathlon, how important are swimming drills and what are some of the simple easy ones that people can start incorporating into there swim training now to turn them into better triathletes?

Simple, easy swim drills for beginner triathletes

RUDOLF
So, Brad, with swimming, unfortunately, swimming is basically 70% based is technique and in 30% is fitness base. So swimming goes down more to technique than just being able to swim for longer distances. So as soon as your technique suffers in the pool, then unfortunately, your speed and efficiency also suffers. So the drills are very important to hone your swimming skills and your swimming stroke, just to be more efficient in the pool. And then as well to get you from point A to point B faster without being tired towards the end of the swim. So basically, getting you fresher out the water so you can jump on the bike and cycle and do the run.

So with swimming, there's a lot of drills that you can do. But it's best to break up the drills into very easy drills and then also build the drills as your swimming technique and your experience in the pool grows as well. So a very simple swimming drill that you can do is just a one arm swim, you hold one arm in front of you at all times and you just swim using your left arm, focusing on a nice catch in a nice pull underneath the water. So you do that for one length, then swimming back the other length using the other arm. Then it's important to incorporate into your full stroke the drill that you just practiced. So then after that you'll do a length of full normal swimming.

So you can either break it down depending on your pool length, you can do 25 drill, 25 for swim then, or you can even break it up as 50 drills, so you do 50 one arm, 50 swim 50 other arm drill. So that's a very basic, simple drill that you can do. Then also, as you progress more into the swimming drills, you can do the 575 drill, which is five one arm, seven full strokes, and then five strokes on the other arm. So for swimming, that's a very simple uncomplicated tool.

And then we can also make it a lot more difficult to say you do the chicken wing drill, which is basically every time when you swim, in the recovery phase, when your arm is above the water, you take your tongue and you press it into your armpits and then into the water as a normal stroke, that just helps you to get high elbow, a high recovery in the pull. So there's an easy example for that. And then also a drill that a lot of people forget, is just a simple sighting drill where you swim four or five strokes normally, and then one or two strokes looking up as you would do in a race. But also when people do it in a pool, they just look up, they don't really spot or sight anything.

So if you've got a brightly coloured water bottle or towel or bag or anything, put it at the end of the pool and then sight that bag on the one length and then swim back the other length. And then if you've got a swimming partner, or if you can do it yourself, move the bag around in the pool area or the bottle or something like that, so that you practice actually sighting the bottle, not just looking up and then carrying on. So as you can see, those are three very simple drills. But it will help a lot with the efficiency in the pool.

Where to incorporate swim drills in your training plan

BRAD
Rudolf, how often would you incorporate those sort of drills in your in your swimming sets? Is that something you do in every session you do? Or is it once a week, once every two weeks? How would you add that?

RUDOLF
I would add drills in every swim session that you do. It's like every session has got a warm up and cool down so in the pool every session has got warm up and cool down and a drill set. So you basically start with a warm up and then do a few drills, then you'll do your main set and then cool down towards the end. So also you don't want to do the drills towards the end of the set when you're tired. Because then the technique is going out the window and you're reinforcing bad technique when you do your drills.

BRAD
Awesome. Well, if you want to check out our training programmes, we've got a whole bunch of triathlon training programmes on the Coach Parry platform, just head over to coachparry.com/triathlon. And you can check all those details out we've got you covered pretty much from beginner sprint programmes right through to advanced Ironman distance programmes. You can get access to all of those the training videos, the podcast, as well as a very interactive online forum with athletes from around the world who are there to support encourage and hold you accountable. Rudolf, thank you very much for your time. We look forward to catching up again next week.

RUDOLF
Thanks Brad, cheers.